Emerald Blaze Page 9

  In its past life, this building served as an office, which worked for us on a business level, but wasn’t great for our living arrangements. I walked past the receptionist counter, made a left, and headed down a long hallway to what was once the cafeteria and now was our kitchen. Ahead, bright electric lights and loud voices told me the family was up. Kind of late for dinner . . .

  A little black shadow padded out of the kitchen and streaked to me, her tail wagging so hard, she nearly went airborne.

  I scooped my dog up. Shadow licked my face, her whole body wiggling. My chest tightened. Suddenly heat warmed the backs of my eyes.

  Noises drifted from the kitchen, excited chatter, the sound of forks and knives on plates, the clatter of glasses being picked up and set back down. The air smelled of spicy meat and baked taco shells.

  I hugged Shadow to me and stuck my face into her fur, trying to get myself under control. I couldn’t walk in there crying.

  Leon said something I didn’t catch. Grandma Frida laughed.

  It was fine. It had been a long day with many sharp turns, that was all. I was just tired.

  Shadow twisted around in my arms. Hot tongue brushed my cheek. The tight knot in my chest dissolved. I squeezed her to me and set her down on the floor. She wagged her tail. I didn’t have to do anything to make my little black dog happy. I just had to come home.

  The urge to cry passed, and my brain woke up. I had things to do and the first on that list was to verify what Alessandro had told me. He didn’t lie to me. That kind of emotional storm would be impossible to fake. But I wanted to see things for myself.

  His father died at a wedding less than twenty years ago. Any wedding attended by a Prime would be special enough to be filmed.

  I pulled out my phone and stepped into one of the front rooms that served as our office. Shadow bounded in after me. I shut the door and texted Bug.

  Are you busy?

  Bug worked as Connor and Nevada’s surveillance specialist. A swarmer implanted with arcane magic, he processed visual information at superhuman speed.

  The phone chimed. Not particularly.

  I need a quick search and I don’t want anyone to know.

  Shoot.

  I paused, trying to organize my thoughts. Shadow made circles around my feet, sniffing at my borrowed shoes.

  I need to know about a wedding. It took place fifteen years ago, probably in Italy. The best man was Marcello Sagredo. I need to confirm he was murdered during this wedding. There might be a recording.

  My phone rang. I answered.

  “Is he right there next to you?” Bug roared into the phone. “Is that spoiled moneyfucker in the room with you now, Catalina?”

  “No, because he died fifteen years ago.”

  “That’s not who I mean, and you know it. He came back, didn’t he? Let me guess, he’s in trouble and he needs you to save him.”

  “No. He isn’t in trouble, but I’m forced to work with him.”

  “Shit on a stick!”

  “Bug, I don’t have a choice. Can you do this for me or not?”

  “Of course I’ll do it. Here is my price. Next time you see him, I want you to tell him, ‘Hey dickfucker, Bug is watching you.’ Because I am.”

  He hung up.

  Well, that went well.

  Shadow stood up on her hind legs and leaned on my leg, looking up at me with big brown eyes. I petted her. “Let’s go.”

  I walked into the kitchen. The whole family had gathered around the oversized dining room table. Bern, my oldest cousin, big, broad-shouldered, with tousled hair that couldn’t decide if it was light brown or dark blond. Leon next to him, a sharp grin on his face. Arabella, looking surly, her long blond hair curled into ringlets.

  On the other side of Bern, at the head of the table, Grandma Frida loaded her taco. Thin, bird-boned, with a halo of platinum curls and a hint of machine grease at her hairline, she saw me and winked. On her left, Mom scooped mango salsa onto her plate. Dark haired and bronze skinned, the only person in the family with darker skin than me, Mom used to be athletic and hard. During her last tour in the Balkans, she’d ended up as a POW. The experience robbed her of the full use of one of her legs. Even after two surgeries, her knee still hurt.

  Nevada sat next to Mom. She wore a pristine white dress with a boat neckline, three-quarter sleeves, and a knee-length paneled skirt that draped gracefully over her bump. Her hair framed her face in a sophisticated updo and her makeup was perfectly done. She must’ve come from a business meeting.

  Nevada picked up a pickle, dipped it into honey, and stuck half of it into her mouth.

  “Eww,” Arabella said. “Someone take that away from her.”

  Nevada squinted at her. Most of the pregnancy books I read warned to expect mood swings in the last trimester. Nevada was forty weeks pregnant and cool as a cucumber. She claimed she’d put on forty pounds, which didn’t slow her down any, and if she had mood swings, we sure as hell hadn’t seen them. She was her calm, sometimes scary, self, and the look she gave Arabella would have given the five Primes I’d met today serious pause.

  “Touch my pickles and die.”

  I took the chair next to Nevada. She reached over and patted my back. Leon must have brought everyone up to speed on our monster adventure and race to MII.

  Arabella squinted back. “You’re almost nine months pregnant. Shouldn’t you be soft, and happy, and glowing? When are we gonna see some glow?”

  Arabella clearly had a death wish.

  Nevada finished her pickle spear and licked honey off of her fingertips. “My back hurts, the kid inside me keeps kicking me in the kidneys, I have to pee every five minutes, my legs cramp, and I can’t get out of bed by myself. I have to roll to the side, which is harder right now since my husband is somewhere in the Russian Imperium and he isn’t there to steady me. And how was your day of being young, beautiful, skinny, and carefree? Why aren’t you glowing?”

  Arabella stuck her tongue out and turned back to her plate. Something was wrong.

  “What happened?” I asked her.

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Something did.”

  Arabella rolled her eyes. “I can’t get any privacy in this family.”

  No, you can’t. “What happened?”

  “Some guy rear-ended me with his Tahoe on Wilcrest Drive.”

  The collective chewing stopped.

  “Are you okay?” Nevada asked.

  “I’m okay, Baby is okay; he just bounced off my bumper.”

  “Damn right he did,” Grandma Frida said between bites. “That’s 7.5 mm ballistic steel.”

  Arabella loved her red Mercedes. We bought it for her used, and she had been in three accidents since getting her license. This made four. After our warehouse was attacked by an elite mercenary team, Grandma Frida tried to convince her to switch to something more “sensible,” but my sister refused, since Grandma Frida’s idea of sensible was a tank. Grandma settled for upgrading the Mercedes to VPAM 7 armor. She souped up the engine to compensate for the added weight and now the Mercedes sounded like a pack of hungry lions.

  “What were you doing out on Wilcrest?” Mom asked.

  “I wanted oyster nachos from Cajun Kitchen.”

  Nevada’s eyes glazed over for a second. “Oh, that does sound good.”

  “I’ll get you some next time,” Arabella said.

  Leon dropped his fork on the table and shook his hands. “What happened with the accident?”

  “Nothing happened. He got out of the car. I got out too. I was in a really good mood because I’d curled my hair and had a sundress on.”

  And that was my younger sister in a nutshell. Curling her hair and putting on a sundress meant the world was hers.

  “He came out, looked at his grille, and then he grabbed his hair and started screaming that it was an aftermarket grille. He accused me of driving my mom’s car, not knowing how to drive, called me the C-word. And his friends in the car laughed and pointed
at me.”

  “So he just screamed at you?” Nevada leaned forward, her expression focused.

  “Pretty much.”

  “And what did you do?” Nevada asked.

  Arabella sighed. “You want to know what I did? Nothing. I stood there like a moron and let him scream at me. I don’t even know why I did that. I’m not a pushover.”

  Three years ago, Arabella would have exploded. She would have changed shape right there in front of the Cajun Kitchen, stomped on that Tahoe, and rode it like a skateboard up and down the street. We had dodged a giant bullet.

  “What did the driver look like?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t look at him that well. Blond, well-built, jock type, probably twenty-five, twenty-eight, between one hundred and sixty and one hundred and eighty pounds, about five foot ten, clean shaven, black T-shirt with a grey outline of Texas on it, khaki cargo shorts, carrot-red Nikes with white laces, a fake Rolex. And not a good fake Rolex either. He was driving a black Chevy Tahoe, maybe 2012 or so, with a small dent in the bumper on the driver’s side. There were three other people in the car.”

  “Did you take a pic?” I asked.

  “No,” Arabella squeezed out through clenched teeth. “Like I said, I stood there and let him yell at me. He didn’t even give me his insurance. Since he kept screaming about his grille, I told him he could sell the knock-off Rolex he was wearing to pay for a new one. He started cussing, and I said that we needed to get the cops involved. Then he just drove off. It was a random thing. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. We were talking about Nevada. When is Connor coming home?”

  Really? That was a low blow.

  A week ago, Connor got word that one of the soldiers he served with got himself entangled in a kidnapping in Russia. He was part of the rescue team, which hadn’t come back to base. Alan was one of the sixteen soldiers who made it out of the Belize jungle with Connor. My brother-in-law would do anything for them, but Nevada could be due any day, so he’d hesitated. And my pregnant sister practically pushed him into the plane to the Russian Imperium to go and rescue the rescue team. We hadn’t heard anything since.

  “Arabella,” Mom said in her sergeant voice.

  Arabella looked at her plate.

  “You’ll know when I know,” Nevada said. “He’ll handle it and come home.”

  “Heart called,” Mom said, keeping her voice casual.

  Suddenly everybody decided that their food was fascinating, me included. The tacos were to die for.

  Heart was Rogan’s second-in-command, in charge of the military operations conducted by Rogan’s mercenaries. Six months ago, Mom had called him for help. We couldn’t afford him, but Heart dropped everything and came to protect us anyway. We paid for his protection—he’d quoted us a ridiculously low rate—but after his employment ended, he’d stuck around, reviving Rogan’s old HQ across the street. He and his soldiers returned to it between jobs, which conveniently offered us additional security. Our own security chief, Patricia Taft, was now fully up to speed, leading a crew of new, handpicked guards, but having Heart near made everyone feel better.

  Heart and Mom were meticulously polite with each other in public, but when Heart was in residence, there was always some reason for him to come over or for Mom to go over there. Something was happening between them, but it was fragile and tenuous and all of us did our best to ignore it, afraid that if we looked too hard at it, it would disappear.

  “Oh?” I asked. “How is he doing?”

  “He’s fine. He said to say hello.”

  To the side, out of Mom’s peripheral vision, Arabella wagged her eyebrows.

  I loaded another taco onto my plate. I was starving.

  “So, how’s Linus?” Grandma Frida asked.

  Subtlety was Grandma Frida’s middle name.

  “Good.”

  “Is that the family we are now?” Leon asked dramatically. “The family where nobody talks about their things? Where everything is just ‘good’ and ‘fine’?”

  Bern reached over and tapped the back of Leon’s head. “She isn’t going to tell you about Linus. Stop already.”

  “How’s the fire tank coming along?” I asked.

  Grandma Frida grunted.

  One of the local Houses had bought a custom firefighting tank from the Russian Imperium. Vodoley 03 was a marvel of Russian engineering. It carried about 25,000 liters of various liquids and could spray them in different patterns. It could also take a hit from a high-explosive 155 mm artillery shell and self-deploy two hundred and fifty km on a single tank of gas, but something had gone bonkers with its custom-built filtering system. Grandma Frida had been trying to coax it back to life for the last three days with no success.

  “That good, huh?” Mom said.

  Grandma Frida bristled. “Eat your food, Penelope.”

  “We have a new case,” I said.

  I told them about Felix’s murder, omitting anything that had to do with Wardens or the serum.

  Mom bit her lower lip. “There is a lot of money involved. This makes me nervous.”

  “That’s why we’ll stay on lockdown,” I said.

  Arabella groaned. I ignored her.

  “Let’s divide and conquer. I have four suspects. Everybody gets one.” I pointed at Arabella, Leon, and Bern in turn. “You get a Prime, you get a Prime, everybody gets a Prime, and we all run an in-depth background check. Is that agreeable to everyone?”

  “Yes,” Bern told me.

  Leon nodded.

  Arabella rolled her eyes. “Work, work, work . . .”

  I tapped my phone, sending out the mass email I had written on the drive home. “Pick whoever you want except Tatyana Pierce. Cornelius wants that one.”

  Nevada frowned. “I bet he does.”

  Arabella looked at her phone, jumped up, and ran out of the room.

  Grandma Frida blinked. “Like what is even going on with that child?”

  My sister sprinted back into the kitchen, carrying a tablet. Her eyes were the size of saucers. “Hua Ling!”

  “What?” Mom asked.

  “He’s the royal physician! The assassin! Hua Ling!”

  No way.

  Leon pivoted to her, his face concerned. “Is it drugs? You can tell me.”

  “It’s not drugs,” I told him.

  “It’s The Legend of Han Min,” Grandma Frida said.

  Mom gave her an odd look.

  “What?” Grandma Frida asked her. “I watched a few episodes with them. There is action and the actors are very pretty. You should see the costumes.”

  “It’s a Chinese xianxia drama,” I explained. “It’s high fantasy, set in a mystical land, a lot of martial arts and Chinese mythology. Han Min is a martial arts heroine who ends up in the imperial palace and Hua Ling is a mystical alchemist who can cure any illness but is secretly an assassin trying to murder the emperor.”

  “That explains everything,” Leon said.

  Arabella marched over and stuck a tablet under his nose. “This is Hua Ling.”

  On the tablet a startlingly beautiful man with a waterfall of dark hair sailed through the air swinging a sword.

  She flicked her fingers across the tablet. “This is Stephen Jiang.”

  A picture from Augustine’s files showed Stephen in a suit.

  “See? Same person.”

  It did kind of look like Stephen.

  Leon flicked his finger back and forth, switching between the pictures, once, twice. Bern took the tablet away from him, set the portraits side by side, and handed it back.

  Arabella tapped the tablet. “It’s him. It’s Cheng Feng.”

  “I thought you said his name is Hua Ling,” Nevada said.

  “The character’s name is Hua Ling. The actor’s name is Cheng Feng!” Arabella waved her arms in exasperation. “How are you not understanding this?”

  “Do you understand this?” Nevada asked me.

  “I do but I watch the show.”

  “I�
�m telling you.” Arabella pounded her fist on the table for emphasis. “It’s the same guy!”

  “Even if he is, how is it relevant?” Leon asked.

  “Because of this.” Arabella tapped her tablet.

  Hua Ling appeared on the screen, dressed in black and wearing a matching hooded cowl and a mask across the lower part of his face. He dashed across the double-eave hip roof through the rain, leaped impossibly high, and flung raindrops at the soldiers in ancient Chinese armor below. The raindrops turned into blades and sliced through the soldiers like razor-sharp needles.

  “That’s special effects,” Leon said.

  “What if it isn’t?” Arabella asked. “What if Catalina goes to see him and he turns her face into a pincushion?”

  “You don’t even know it’s him. His face is covered. What you have here is some sort of Chinese ninja on a wire and lots of CGI . . .”

  Arabella grabbed a spoon and threw it at Leon. He caught it.

  “No violence,” Bern rumbled.

  I glanced at Nevada. “Could an aquakinetic do this?”

  “In theory,” she said. “I never came across one who did.”

  That’s what I thought too. Most of the aquakinetics killed by drowning. It was faster and more efficient.

  “I’m taking Stephen Jiang,” Arabella announced.

  “Marat Kazarian,” Leon said.

  “Cheryl Castellano.” Bern raised his finger.

  “Okay,” I said. “My first interview is tomorrow at ten with Kazarian.”

  “Do you need backup?” Leon crunched his knuckles.

  “I already have it.”

  “Who?” Leon asked.

  Do it quick, like ripping off a Band-Aid. “Alessandro Sagredo.”

  The room exploded.

  I dragged myself from my small bathroom to my bed, crawled into it, and sprawled on my back. Shadow jumped up, turned three times, and settled on the blankets by my feet.

  Once I mentioned Alessandro, the family had ganged up on me. Arabella screamed like a pterodactyl and demanded to know where Alessandro was staying, while punching her palm with her fist. Bern swore, which had happened exactly six times since he came to live with us. Grandma Frida promised to hit Alessandro with a wrench when he came over. Leon produced a gun, and then Mom asked him what the rule was about guns at the dinner table, and then he said that this was a special case and he had a bullet with Alessandro’s name on it. Then she told him that writing names on bullets was no way to go through life. And Nevada just sat there, in the middle of the chaos, and listened to me lie through my teeth about how Alessandro was no longer an emotional factor for me.